[Samba] samba process dead

[Hannu Tikka]

> I am having trouble with a samba server version 2.2.5 on SuSe 8.1.
>
> Very often my samba processes get to state D and can't be killed
> anymore.
> The clients seem to continue to connect and so I get even more dead
> samba
> processes.
> These processes can't be killed, all I can do is reboot the machine.

We have Suse 8.2 + samba3 (reiserfs). We had hardware problems and server
crashed few times.
After that I noticed same thing that you, certain users smbd processes get
to state D and so on..
Also I noticed that disk containing user homedirectories was reported NOT
clean at startup.
I halted machine and ran fsck to that disk. Disk was reported clean at
startup, but after a while there was a bunch of smbd processes in state D
again. And disk was NOT clean again.
We have roaming profiles on users homedirectories and it turned out that
those users who got smbd:s in state D had corrupted profile files and that
messed up reiserfs. So I backed up those profile directories and deleted
them. After that I ran fsck and restored profile files.
We haven't got those problems anymore.

So at least check that the disk is clean and if possible backup and
restore user disks.

Hannu